It is interesting that the casualty ratio dramatically shifts in favor of the Soviets in the 'switch' stage. From Case blue to pre-Uranus the loss ratio is 6.5:1 (Soviets: Axis)

In Stalingrad itself, the loss ratio is 3:1 (Soviets:Germans)

In the next phase of the Stalingrad campaign (Attacks against Axis Allies, other German armies, Uranus to Stalingrad end), the casualties even out to around 1:1. The Axis lose double the men of the prior phase.

The losses of Soviets:Germans reverses in Operation Ring to 1:4.

2.7 million Axis and Soviet casualties combined.

What stands out with this campaign is the hardness of the fighting by both sides, particularly 62nd Army and 6.A/4.PzA. Both in the main, fought with a level of determination and courage that is much higher than most other times of the war.

I'll take a look at this later, but the Glantz/House re-telling is not based largely on the German but both and including Soviet sources- they have their own interpretation of what happened as I have just posted.

In the past, I have read the Balck/Mellanthin memoir accounts and the Balck interview by the US Army. It was difficult getting Balck there in the first place and if you read behind the lines, the US officers were appealing to their big egos, and goading the two generals to talk & expand on their POV by talking to them like they were rockstars.

Who is RN?
The episode is just a pure example of an event blown out of proportion in German accounts. While depicted as an epic panzer battle it was in fact an indecisive engagement with a moderate losses on the Soviet side. It appears that the 1 TC which didn't really recover from "Uranus" had in fact less operational tanks than the German 11 PzD had.

It is mentioned that 1 TC received a large pool of reinforcement armor- something like 100 tanks after its losses from Uranus. Also, damaged armor must have been repaired.

I might take a look at this later but really I'm not that into the Chir battle. Between the two German thrusts, the LVII PzK's effort is more interesting.

What is also interesting is the not well known complement to Little Saturn: The also large Tormosin and Kotel'nikovskii offensives, which involved huge numbers of armor as well.

I got a copy of this book recently:
Death on the Don: The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front 1941-44 by Jonathan Trigg

Quote:

Nazi Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Operation Barbarossa, was the largest invasion in history. Almost 3.5 million men smashed into Stalin’s Red Army, reaching the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol. But not all of this vast army was German; indeed, by the summer of 1942, over 500,000 were Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croatians – Hitler’s Axis allies. As part of the German offensive that year, more than four allied armies advanced to the Don only to be utterly annihilated in the Red Army’s Saturn and Uranus winter offensives. Hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded or captured, and the German Sixth Army was left surrounded and dying in the rubble of Stalingrad. Poorly equipped, often badly led and totally unprepared for the war, they were asked to fight. Drawing on first-hand accounts from veterans and civilians, as well as previously unpublished source material, Death on the Don tells the story of one of the greatest military disasters of the Second World War.

Yeide's book on Patton has a short history of the 1.K in 1941 and then the 24.Pz in Case Blue and Stalingrad. It focuses on commander Broich

Quote:

Broich had seen things in the Soviet Union that, by all accounts, gave him reason to loath the Nazis. In a conversation secretly taped by British intelligence at a camp in which Broich was a prisoner of war, Generalmajor Johannes Bruhn, who had commanded the 533rd Volksgrenadier Division, told Broich that Germany no longer deserved to win the war “after the amount of human blood we’ve shed knowingly and as a result of our delusions and blood lust. We’ve deserved our fate.” Broich replied, “We shot women as if they had been cattle. There was a large quarry where 10,000 men, women, and children were shot. They were still lying in the quarry. We drove out on purpose tosee it. It was the most bestial thing I ever saw.”73